With Nothing to Lose
by peroxidepest17
Summary: Gambling is a vice, pride is a sin, and sometimes they're all you've got going for you until they're not.


**Title:** With Nothing to Lose  
**Universe: **Angel  
**Theme/Topic: **N/A  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Character/Pairing/s:** Doyle focus (Angel and Cordy in the background)  
**Warnings/Spoilers:** Bad memory on my part. OOC?  
**Word Count: **2,475  
**Su****mmary:** Gambling is a vice, pride is a sin, and sometimes they're all you've got going for you until they're not.  
**Dedication:** silverprism's thank you fic for donating to my cause! ILU! Also, thanks to gaisce for the push.  
**A/N:** I have no idea what happened between the beginning and the end of this fic. All I do know is that food coma was involved, and things made sense when I started but went away somewhere in the middle.  
**Disclaimer:** No harm or infringement intended.

* * *

"What happened to you?"

Doyle stops paying attention to where he's pouring his morning coffee when Angel asks the question. He ends up splashing some of the hot liquid over the side of the mug and onto his hand in the process, yelping in surprise when it burns. "Ow. Damn."

The vampire arches an eyebrow at him.

Doyle blinks and sucks at his red skin a little. "What?"

"You're all…" the vampire trails off and starts to make a vague gesture with ones his hands, the kind that are usually a good indication of him meaning "I smell blood and stuff," without him actually wanting to say it out loud.

Doyle forgets about the coffee burns. "Just some residual scrapes'n soreness from that demon horde last week is all," he hastens to explain to his new boss, with a smile that has both a healthy dose of devil-may-care and wry self-deprecation mixed in it. A perfect, harmless sidestep. He motions to the vampire wistfully. "Don't got the healing factor you do, is all."

Angel frowns. "Are you s…"

"Yes. I'm fine! Perfectly fine. Don't say another thing about it. You'll embarrass a guy goin' on about his old bruises like that, Angel. Make him feel inferior and such."

Angel's brow furrows severely. "Did they hit you that h…"

Doyle clears his throat and gives the vampire a significant look, eyes shifting towards Cordelia, who is lovely and self-involved as always at her desk.

Angel looks like he wants to keep talking, but after a breath, and then his own careful, sideways look at Cordelia (who is filing her nails and could care less), the vampire finally lets the eyebrow back down. "Right. Sorry."

Doyle manages to keep the smile on before whisking his cup of coffee out of the room. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna read the paper, enjoy my coffee and see if there's any helpless out there we can attend to without havin' to give me a splitting headache first."

He shuts the door behind him jovially, puts the coffee on his desk, and then very gingerly lowers himself into his chair.

Cordelia finally looks up from her nails. "What's his problem?"

"He doesn't have a problem," Angel tries, ever faithful in his new wingman position.

On Cordelia's "oh please," look, the vampire dutifully returns to drinking his blood before it congeals.

* * *

Doyle opens up the paper and scowls at the front of the sports section. "Clippers lose to Nets," it reads. It might as well read, "Allan Doyle Owes Seven Gs or Two Fingers, Whichever Comes First," with a super title stating, "Charlie the Sphynx Takes Down-Payment From Doyle's Ribs."

Except not really, because a down-payment would mean he'd _paid_ something so that he could owe Charlie less. Which he hadn't. Which is why his ribs are broken but he still owes seven Gs.

He hears the door open behind him and Cordelia clops out to her desk, wearing some sort of magnificent four-inch wedge sandals that make her ankles look like they're straight out of a fetishist's wet dream.

He puts down the newspaper and looks up at her sweetly. "Hey, Cordy," he begins, all charm and adorableness as he lays the accent on thick. Chicks dig the accent.

"No," she replies smoothly, without looking away from her reflection in the compact she's holding to properly appreciate the charm and adorableness of his expression. "I have rent to pay."

He manages to look mortally wounded at her accusation. "Hey, you don't know that I was gonna…"

"No," she answers, and says it like she actually _did_.

Doyle sighs and backs off wisely; he supposes he's on his own for lunch today. And probably the rest of the week.

Unless the odds on the Lakers/Warriors game are in his favor.

He's reaching for the newspaper before he can remind himself that this is how he got into this mess in the first place.

Part of him thinks that maybe he has a problem.

Another part of him thinks he'll hang onto it, because it's all he's ever had that was really, truly his.

* * *

Angel is the one who finds him curled up in the alleyway behind the office a few days later, bloody and broken after a run in with Colter's goons during the afternoon, where they'd proceeded to engage in a lively discussion regarding the subject of the kidneys he's inevitably going to have to sell in order to pay off the long overdue interest on his loans.

"Mr. Colter is very concerned," the goons had said, shaking their heads at Doyle, "about the current state of his investments with you." They'd had a lot of other stuff to say after that too, but by then they'd also been busy manhandling the goods and Doyle hadn't been able to pay much attention to what where the conversation was going. All he does know for sure is that he probably can't sell those kidneys anymore, not at peak prices anyway. Damaged goods and all.

"Doyle, what happened?" Angel demands in the meantime, wonderful and clueless and concerned as he hefts the groggy Irishman to his feet and carries him inside. "Demon attack? Vampire attack? Were they organized? What did they want?"

Doyle coughs up some blood and tries to smile. "Mugging," he lies, and it rolls easy and smooth off his tongue even though it hurts to talk. "Bet the sorry bastard who jumped me was surprised to find out I didn't have a cent on me." And then, before Angel can ask anything else, he lets his eyes flutter closed.

Angel picks him up after that, and hazily, part of him realizes this is the first time after a beating that he hasn't had to carry his sorry ass inside himself.

* * *

Doyle's never had a nursemaid before either.

Two is downright luxurious, even if one of them just gives him strange, pitying looks every once in a while and then makes him drink tea that's steeped too long before going back to browsing the pages of a _Marie Claire_ pilfered from one of their neighbors' offices in the building.

The other nursemaid drinks blood and also gives him pitying looks but at least he doesn't have to deal with the tea.

"Hey," he manages, when he wakes up the following evening. "You don't have to sit there and watch me you know. Kinda creepy."

Angel's brow is heavily furrowed. "Doyle…"

"Got tea?" Doyle interrupts suddenly, and manages to sound like he actually wants it. He supposes he does, in lieu of letting the thoughtfulness on Angel's face run its course.

The vampire blinks and then stands. "I'll go make some."

"Cordy's a doll at it," Doyle croaks after him. "Lets it sit for twenty minutes to just the right flavor. Strong enough to kill a man."

Angel bangs around his kitchen looking for anything clean. There isn't anything of course, and the sound of the sink running and things being scrubbed gives Doyle the chance to go back to sleep without having to answer any questions.

He doesn't think he's up to facing questions he's never been able to figure out the answers to.

* * *

"Nothin' to lose," Doyle tells himself as he places his last twenty dollars into the chip pile in the middle of the table. Three queens sit safely in his hands and he's finally starting to feel a little bit lucky.

Afterwards, when he's staring unbelievably, inconceivably, at four perfect aces all lined up in a row from the hand of the man across from him, all he can do is simply sit back and watch the last of his money for the month fall into someone else's pocket.

He raises his shot glass to the ceiling in salute. "Nothin' to lose," he repeats, and drowns the alcohol before he gets tossed out of the room.

When he crawls into bed in the early morning hours in search of sleep, he is greeted instead, by head-spinning, mind-numbing, nausea inducing pain, bright flashes of light, and the name of some poor bastard even more pathetic than he is.

He writes it down, shakes off the ache, and calls Angel.

They meet at the office an hour later, and for the next few hours at least, Doyle gets to forget about how empty his pockets and his stomach are.

* * *

"Doyle, is everything okay with you?" Angel asks some nights later, when he's handing out paychecks like they're some sort of blight on the earth and morally wrong.

Doyle tries to keep his mouth from watering at the sight of that pretty white envelope.

"Fine. Yeah, everything's fine, man," he says, trying not to sound like a junkie two seconds away from getting a hit of the good stuff.

Angel gives him one of those soulful looks, full of calf-eyes and "I'm here for you" innuendo. "If you want to talk about anything," he starts, and then the envelope is coming, and it's in Doyle's hand, and Doyle grins and feels on top of the world all of a sudden again.

"You'll be the first guy I find," Doyle vows, and tucks the check into the inside of his jacket pocket. "The very first."

He ducks out the door in a rush, because if he makes it to Rodney's in time, he can put it all on the Kings game. He's got a feeling—more than a hunch—that the purple and black are in for the win tonight.

He makes it halfway down the stairs when the vision hits.

* * *

Two days later he still has his paycheck. And a black eye from the whole helping the helpless thing.

The Kings had lost, as it turns out.

Which he chalks up to some sort of weird good luck, because once he cashes the baby burning a hole in his pocket it means they'll let him into Lenny's poker game tonight.

When Cordelia asks him why he's so cheery on his way out, he says he's feeling lucky.

She snorts, delicately, beautifully, and after a thoughtful minute, some sort of deviously gorgeous light bulb goes off over that head of hers.

"Give me a ride to my audition?" she asks, so sweetly it could break a man's heart.

Doyle pauses, hand on the door. "What?"

She eyes him. "It's in Santa Monica in an hour."

He swallows. "Right. Sure. Lead the way."

They get into the broken down convertible and Doyle watches the way the wind catches wisps of her hair around her neck out of the corner of his eye the entire drive to the coast.

He finds he forgets about poker entirely.

* * *

By the time he can even remember poker after that, Colter's guys have come and gone again, and his paycheck is gone with them.

But apparently it's enough of an incentive for them to leave his internal organs completely intact this time.

Darkly, Doyle wonders if this is what it feels like to finally go straight.

It is nice to be able to breathe without complications though. Maybe there's something to this whole honest living thing after all.

* * *

He pays some of his back rent with the next paycheck on a whim and feels decent about it for days afterwards.

Hope starts to stir up somewhere inside of him that he thought was long dead and rotten.

Angel saves seven kids from a human sacrifice on the very same day and as Doyle helps hustle the crying children out of the circle drawn in chicken's blood on the floor, he begins to wonder if maybe he can be a little bit heroic too.

Not a champion, not like Angel, but maybe a little.

* * *

Charlie the Sphynx pays him an early morning visit three days later and reminds Doyle about seven Gs and what it's like to be a perpetual loser.

This time, Cordelia's the one who finds him in the alley afterwards, and when she does, he smiles weakly at her and realizes that this is what it means to go right back to zero all over again.

It's not bad really. It's Comfortable. Familiar.

Words like champion and hero aren't supposed to have meaning to guys like Doyle anyway.

All they've ever had is this. Just this.

He passes out with Cordelia's hand on his cheek and her voice in his ear.

* * *

A week later, she makes him ask her out for coffee.

Doyle nods dumbly at her and does exactly that; in the ensuing moments he thinks that the world is a strange and unpredictable place and that maybe he'll never be a hero or a champion, but with her smiling at him like that, maybe he's not destined to be a complete loser either.

* * *

Luck is a fickle mistress. That's what his ma always used to tell him.

And as the lights in the ship's hold start to glow he realizes that it's true.

He's found someone willing to drag a sorry loser like him out of the trash and still talk to him afterwards. Be his friend.

He's got a beautiful girl who by all rights shouldn't be willing to give him the time of day ready to go with him on a coffee date that's never going to happen.

He has a job that pays decent. The tank in his car is almost full. He had enough leftover quarters in his pocket to do his laundry yesterday.

Everything was starting to look up.

Except now he's on a ship full of people just like him, who are going all to die. And he knows how to stop it.

He doesn't want to. Maybe if it had been a few days ago, maybe if it had been last year, when he'd had nothing to lose. But right now, he doesn't want to.

_I have to_, he thinks, as the lights get brighter and the voices go quiet and Angel looks like he's getting ready to go off and die, be the big hero, the chosen one, the champion. And a small voice inside Doyle tells him, _They're all I've ever had going for me._

If either of them are gone then there's nothing left. Not for guys like Doyle anyway. Without Cordelia and Angel, guys like Doyle sit broken and bleeding behind dumpsters, forgotten and pathetic as the rest of the world passes them by.

Without them, guys like Doyle are less than nothing.

But without him, he thinks they'll be okay. Knows it. Cordelia will always be beautiful and amazing and strong and Angel will always be a champion.

For once, Doyle's the one with everything to lose. For once, all the cards are in his hands, and he knows exactly how they're going to play out this time, for sure.

So he smiles and kisses Cordelia.

And then he jumps.

**END**


End file.
